GRAPHIC DESIGNER

I’m Kerry O’Sullivan, a graphic designer with over 20 years of experience designing for websites, print marketing and multimedia. My designs are known for being clean and professional, while artistic. I believe the design should reflect the client, not the designer, so my work is conservative when necessary and playful when allowed.
 
When I began my career, little did I know my interest in educational media would take me on a journey from working at a quintessential internet startup complete with ping pong tournaments at lunch, to working at UNC-Chapel Hill, an internationally renowned leader in higher education. I’ve had the good fortune in my career to meet and work with many talented people and challenge myself to learn from each of them.

As a graphic designer, I have enjoyed the diversity of experiences my career offers, from creating websites for small businesses to corporate 500 companies, or print collateral ranging from the simplest gift cards to large format posters and trade show booth displays.
 
After ten years of focusing mostly on corporate and nonprofit website design, I was honored when I was recruited for employment with my alma mater, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Within the UNC Teaching and Learning Division of ITS (now called ITS-Educational Technologies or EdTech), the projects I encountered took me right back to my roots in anthropology and interest in educational media. In this new role, I designed interfaces for online educational multimedia for UNC faculty to incorporate into their classrooms, including the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC School of Nursing, Psychology faculty, the UNC Writing Center and the UNC Center for Student Success. I also designed the interfaces and creative guidelines for the Highway Safety Resource Center's multimedia projects "Making Your Neighborhood Safe and Walkable" and "Buckle Up to Grow Up." Along with these projects, I was part of the first-ever ‘Massive Open Online Course’ (MOOC) launch at UNC, designing online class material for the Gillings School of Global Public Health’s MOOC “Epidemiology: the Basic Science of Public Health.”

As my role within ITS-Educational Technologies (EdTech) evolved, my projects focused on designing for EdTech staff vs. for faculty. In this role, I supported the team by designing EdTech event posters, online graphics and website interfaces. It was during this time that I completed the user interface design for the UNC Check-In app which allows faculty to track student attendance easily. 

Fast forward to today and I am still working within UNC-ITS but have expanded my design services to the entire department by joining the ITS Communications team. This new position, the first of its kind in ITS, allows me to stretch my skills and take on more responsibility. I hit the ground running and developed an ITS Brand (a sub-brand of UNC) along with a guide for ITS staff to reference. Using the new brand guide, I redesigned a series of postcards mailed to over 8,000 prospective students on behalf of the Carolina Computing Initiative and am currently redesigning their website. For the last two years, I've assisted the Office of Information Security's messaging efforts during their National Cybersecurity Awareness Month by designing posters, digital signs, social media graphics and a selfie banner for the event. I've also been supporting the UNC Service Desk team by creating their posters, postcards, digital signs, and check-in kiosk wrap, and as a committee member contributing to the redesign of their new campus location. In this role, I have been expanding our student outreach by working to modernize ITS' social media presence. I've supported our new Instagram account through making recommendations for content, taking photos at events and supplying graphics. 

Joining the Communications team is a wonderful opportunity to work with all of ITS while it's also allowed me to connect with other campus designers—most designers like myself at UNC work alone within their department. To grow the community of designers on campus, I launched a Teams channel for UNC graphic designers. With the help of UNC Creative, I have been able to grow the Teams channel into a group of nearly forty designers who meet quarterly via Zoom and in-person meetups.